


The Lost

by XCVG



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Atlas is GONE, Dark, Earth, Gen, Inspired by Real Events, Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Portals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-28
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24418489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XCVG/pseuds/XCVG
Summary: Seven years ago, a portal to another world appeared on Remnant. Seven years ago, there was a war. And seven years ago, Atlas was obliterated. Today, the survivors carry on scattered across two worlds, some more fortunate than others.Calla Blaurose once dreamed of being a huntress, of protecting the world from evil. Now she lives in a "resettlement center" in Maryland, brawls with bullies the closest thing to battles against evil. But an unexpected turn of events will force her out into the world on an unforgettable journey that could change everyone's fate forever...
Kudos: 3





	The Lost

**Author's Note:**

> So I’ve been reading Dragon Rose and that’s kind of got me thinking about RWBY again. I actually had a few RWBY fics started- including some that were never publicly posted- before I walked away from it all. I was tempted to pick up my take on America In Remnant, Forty-Nine North, but then I started thinking about the ill-fated fanime again, and one of my friend’s suggestions to make it a story instead.  
> This is my attempt at that.
> 
> For those who aren’t familiar with the aborted fanime (so basically all of you), think of it as Emergence’s evil darker and more mature cousin, at least in terms of story. It was indescribably ugly, because I have the artistic talent of a particular uninspired rock, and the voice acting was horrendous because I voiced almost every character myself.
> 
> I’m still way, way behind on RWBY- I stopped after Volume 4 and haven’t picked it up again- so this is probably going to be inconsistent with canon a bit. I may fix that if this goes anywhere. Of course, for all I know there’s been some major revelation that breaks the entire premise of this fic.
> 
> But, in the immortal words of Peter Chimaera, I decide to write anyway!

_Once again, she was back in Atlas._

_There was little but the black of night and some buildings in the distance and the wall she leaned against, but she was back in Atlas. The wall might have been the basement wall in the house she once lived in, or the academy she had once visited, or a shelter, and it was all of them and none of them and it didn’t matter. It was Atlas._

_Above them, grey birds- eagles, she knew they were eagles, though they were strangely angular and spat fire- fluttered freely from a great glowing crack in the sky, surrounding Atlas and flitting back and forth and letting loose what might have been eggs or droppings or bombs. Archers surrounded her, she couldn’t see them but she knew they were there, and they fired volley after volley of arrows, some of them striking the grey birds and dropping them from the sky._

_Beside her was a woman who was her mother one moment, her friend the next and an Atlesian general the next. Their eyes flickered between alive and dead and it scared her._

_“Don’t worry, Calla, Atlas has the strongest warriors in the world. They’ll keep us safe!” the woman said in her mother’s voice._

_She said that, just like every other time, and it was a lie, just like every other time. Another volley of countless arrows flew upward, and the grey birds turned away and flew back to where they came, and for a moment it seemed like everything would be fine._

_But then a great black bird appeared, like a Nevermore but bigger and blacker and more sinister. No arrows flew, for the archers could not see the bird against the black of night, and even if they could, their arrows could never hope to hit it._

_It laid its egg and turned away, a great terrible egg that morphed into a blunt white bullet with fins, a horrific instrument of death that fell straight toward her._

_And then world erupted into a golden light, a light that should have been glorious but was terrible instead, and she found herself flying away, Atlas growing smaller and smaller in the distance until it all faded away._

The girl awoke drenched in a cold sweat, breathing fast.

“Good afternoon, Calla!” a singsong voice called. Her little sister had a bright smile on her face as she clapped her hands together, in her face as she hung upside-down from the top bunk.

She grimaced and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She was not a morning person, especially not in recent memory and _especially especially_ not today.

The younger girl whine-called, “Calla…”

“Come on, Bunny, it’s not-” Calla reached over and checked her phone, an old Motorola with a crack through the screen. _1:26 PM_ flashed across the screen in accusing white characters. “Oh.”

“Yeah, you slept in a _lot_ ,” Bunny remarked.

With some reluctance, Calla rolled out of bed, pushing Bunny out of the way. Their bunk bed wasn’t bad to sleep in, but it took up fully half the width of the modular trailer they called home. She had to stand to one side to open the dresser and pull out her usual outfit- grey t-shirt and grey leggings. One of these days, she’d get something in blue or purple.

“Did you have a bad dream again?”

“No, just tired,” she lied. As she buckled on her steel breastplate- really more of a fashion statement than practical armor- Calla muttered, “I had a fight after school yesterday. Fights make me tired.”

Her sister rolled her sugar-pink eyes. “Everything makes you tired.”

Calla ignored the remark and focused on strapping on the rest of her armor. One of the pauldrons wasn’t sitting right and she’d have to fix that some time. Or maybe not- it wasn’t like it really mattered. It was more for style than anything. She finished with her armor and laced up her boots. “Is mom out?”

Bunny’s eyes lit up. “Uh-huh! She said she might be able to get us fresh chicken today!”

Calla supposed that was better than a kick in the head. She pulled her gloves on, dragged Scrappy out from under their bed and slung it across her back. “Great. Tell her I’ll be back this afternoon.”

“But Calla-”

She ducked out the door of the place she called home and stepped into the street.

From the air, the Braddock Resettlement Center looked like a collection of grey and brown boxes, stretching on for miles and miles, strung with little lines between them. Surrounding it was a thicker grey line, a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that separated the federal facility from the State of Maryland outside. Bigger grey rectangles were gates and guard towers around the circumference, keeping some people in and other people out.

Calla only knew that from pictures, because she was just a little kid the last time she’d been outside the chain-link fence. On the ground, it was prefab shelters, power lines, dirt roads and people walking with their heads down.

Atlesian flags flew from antennas and makeshift flagpoles, many of them upside-down to signal distress or splashed with color in a desperate attempt to add some cheer to the dreary surroundings. But despite the display, the Stars And Stripes were still visible flying in the corners of the Center, looming over everyone inside.

It was a great metaphor, Calla realized, though it probably wouldn’t go over well if she used it in her English class. _English_ , not _Common Vytalian_ , even though they were almost the same thing.

As she walked, she passed by a scarred veteran in a tattered Specialist uniform, begging for coins. Calla reached into her pocket, but found no coins. There was an explosion in the distance, followed by gunfire. She stopped at the next intersection and waited for a tank to roll by. She’d been told that all of this was a varying degree of insane. For her, it was Saturday.

Her destination was a nondescript brown prefab, sandwiched between a used electronics shop operating out of a derelict semi-trailer and a prefab house painted with a sun-faded mural of Atlas. She squeezed through a gap between the prefab and the semi-trailer, then pushed open a door on the back of the prefab and stepped inside.

Inside was a small, dimly lit bar. Two tables were crammed against one wall, the bar’s only two patrons sitting at one of them. The bar itself was a crude thing hacked together of worn wood, and the place smelled of cheap booze. A pop song in a language she didn’t recognize blared from a wireless speaker on a crate against the opposite wall.

“Aren’t you a little young to be drinking?” the bartender called. He was an old, wrinkled man, though fit for his age, with pinkish-white hair in a messy mop. One eye was seafoam green, the other a milky white.

“Aren’t all bars banned within the Braddock Resettlement Center?” Calla retorted jokingly as she sat down across from him.

“That they are.” The bartender laughed, shaking his head. “The usual?”

She almost answered in the affirmative, but changed her mind at the last second. “No, not today. Surprise me.”

“Sure.” He opened an unlabeled bottle and filled a mostly-clean glass with pale brown liquid, sliding it over across the worn bar. “What’s the occasion?”

“I’ve been accepted to Atlas,” Calla replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Already seven years, huh?” the man asked rhetorically.

“Seven years and a bit,” she said before taking a gulp of her drink. It was strong and burned as it went down, but she couldn’t identify it exactly and, on reflection, probably didn’t want to know. “Seven years and a bit since the war. If Atlas wasn’t a glowing hole in the ground, they’d be sending me my acceptance letter around now.”

“Yeah, probably,” the bartender conceded. “You’re not half-bad with that contraption of yours, even without any combat school.”

Calla smiled a thin, ironic smile. The words were a sincere compliment, and she appreciated that, but they were also a cold reminder of how wrong things had gone. She raised her glass in a toast. “Remember Atlas.”

“Remember Atlas,” echoed the bartender, along with a few other of the patrons.

With that, Calla tossed back the rest of her drink, coughing as it burned her throat. Nonetheless, she slid the glass over to be refilled. It was a special occasion, after all.

“You know, I heard they’re recruiting,” he mentioned, refilling the glass. “The military, I mean. Looking for Aura users with exotic weapons…”

She nursed her drink, unsure.

“Look, kid, let’s be honest. You don’t have any family or friends who made it to another country. You’re not smart enough to go to Harvard under Paperclip. You don’t know any secrets to trade off for preferential treatment. You’ll never make it to either border. And none of us will ever be competing in the Olympics after Rio,” the bartender listed off. “Nobody loves America for what it’s done, but sometimes you’ve got to make a deal with the devil. Besides, the ones in charge aren’t the ones who started the war.”

“Why haven’t you?” Calla asked sourly. “You were a huntsman once upon a time.”

“That was two lifetimes ago. I’m an old man with nothing left. I’ve got one good eye, a peg for a leg, and I buried my last living relative five years ago.” The answer was flippant, but there was real sadness behind it. “You’re young, you’ve got a future, a family-”

“Calla Blaurose!” an angry male voice shouted, accompanied by the crash of the door being thrown open.

The bartender sighed. “Who is it this time?”

There were four of them in total. The one who had shouted was a young man, maybe a teenager, with scraggly black hair, a jacket almost the same color and the blue jeans that were so popular on this world. Beside him was a shorter young woman about the same age, with pink hair that matched her shirt, white jacket contrasting with his black one. Behind them was a dark-skinned man in a red sweater and a very large man wearing the colors of a sports team she didn’t recognize.

“Just some bullies I thought I dealt with yesterday,” Calla answered nonchalantly. Her right hand went for Scrappy, under her jacket. “I can take them.”

“Need some fight music?”

“Give me something from back home.”

“Alright.” He bartender gave her a nod, then began fiddling with a cracked tablet behind the bar. The other two patrons bolted for the door, wanting nothing to do with what was about to happen.

“You thought you could steal from us?” the black-haired man- a boy, really- shouted at her.

“It’s not stealing if it wasn’t yours,” she shot back.

His retort was weak, but spat with venomous anger. “Well, we’re here to collect!”

“You’re welcome to try.” In a practiced motion, she drew Scrappy from beneath her jacket, taking its wide lower grip in both hands and moving into a ready stance.

In theory, Scrapheap Scattergun was a fully usable shotgun, built around a re-activated Remington 1100. But she’d only ever tried firing it once, the transformation process was incredibly finicky, and she had all of two shotgun shells to her name right now anyway.

Up this close, its two sharpened lawnmower blades would do the job just fine. It was a heavy, awkward sword, but she’d learned to work with its limitations and exploit its strengths.

The dark-skinned man charged first, one fist raised high for a powerful strike. It was easy, almost too easy to dodge. Calla nimbly stepped to the side, the man’s fist found nothing, and she slammed her weapon down onto his head grip-first with a resounding crack.

The girl and the giant exchanged a glance before leaping into action- if you could call their sluggish movements leaping. The girl went to her left while the giant went to her right, picking up a folding chair on the way. Calla dashed forward, bringing her blade around in a wide arc to slash across the girl’s legs. Something wet splattered onto her arms and the girl screamed, but Calla barely noticed, instead delivering another quick slash before turning her attention to the giant.

He swung the chair with all his might, and it shattered into a cloud of splinters against her bracer when she raised her left arm to block. The giant man hesitated, surprised, and Calla drove her armored foot into his stomach while she had the opening. When he doubled over, gasping, she finished him with two powerful hacks to his exposed back.

“Oh, fuck this!” the ringleader, who’d kept back, shouted. He backpedaled until he was almost at the door, reaching inside his jacket and pulling something out.

The revolver was levelled at Calla in the second it took for her to realize what it was. She whipped her own weapon up and fired at the same time he did.

The bullet from his revolver pinged off her aura.

The buckshot from her shotgun-sword blew apart his head and splattered his brains across the door behind him.

Calla panted hard, still gripping her shotgun with white knuckles, as she surveyed the carnage. The man she’d shot was very definitely dead, crumpled in a bloody heap on the floor and missing most of his head. The dark-skinned boy was on the floor, unmoving, and both the big man and the girl were lying in pools of their own blood. She wasn’t sure if they were dead, but they weren’t far from it.

She’d been in brawls before, and _none_ of that was normal. “What the fuck just happened?”

Unhelpfully, the bartender remarked, “A brawl happened.”

“A brawl?” she screamed. “Who starts a fight without aura, or weapons? Who tries to finish one?”

“They’re locals,” he concluded calmly, though there was anger in his voice. He gently reached over and pushed Scrappy’s barrel down. “They came from the outside.”

Calla’s brain tried to process that. Why would they start a fight? How did they get in the Center? Why were they stealing yesterday? “What? How can you tell?”

“Look closely at the girl’s hair.” He pointed. “Blonde at the roots. That’s dye.”

“My god…” Still in shock, she managed to pull herself together enough to stow Scrappy under her jacket.

“You better make yourself scarce,” the bartender suggested. “Someone’s gonna come looking, and I can only stall so long. A bunch of local kids dying inside the Center? There’s going to be hell to pay.”

* * *

Even Bunny recognized something was wrong when Calla burst through the door, splattered in blood and hyperventilating. “Did you do a bad thing, sis?”

Their mother was back by then, and she took one look at her blood-splattered daughter and dropped the dishes she’d been washing into the sink with a resounding clunk. “Calla! What happened?”

“I got into another fight and it got really intense and it was with the bullies I ran into yesterday,” Calla blurted out, pacing back and forth so hard it seemed her boots would wear through the floor. “But they attacked me first this time and I thought it was going to be a serious brawl so I used Scrappy and it turned out they had no Aura _at all_ and I blew his head off!”

“Calm down. It’s okay,” her mother soothed, pulling her into a hug which Bunny joined a moment later. “You didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“They’re going to look for me,” Calla said, sniffling and struggling to hold back a sob. “I killed one for sure, maybe three more. They’re not going to let it go.”

“No,” her mom agreed. She squeezed her tighter before letting go. “You need to leave.”

“What? Where would I go?”

She began digging through a drawer, pushing crumpled cash into Calla’s hands as she found it. “Find a man named Derwin in the cloud district. He has a shack on the southeast wall, just past a blue shipping crate. You can’t miss it.”

Calla blinked, confused. “Mom, who’s Derwin? This is… this is a lot of money! What’s it for?”

“Derwin’s a people smuggler. He can get you out of the Center. It won’t come cheap, but this should be enough,” she explained.

“Then what? What do I do?”

“Remember General Balsam?”

She nodded.

“You need to find him-”

“How? How am I going to find him?” She was near hysterics now, she knew it and didn’t care. “How is he going to help me? What am I going to do?”

“Listen to me, Calla.” Her mother put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, locking blue eyes with blue eyes. “You’re a smart, strong girl. If things hadn’t gone so wrong you would have been a great huntress. Now, you need to focus the same way you would as if you’re fighting Grimm. It’s a big world out there, but you _will_ find your way.”

Calla nodded jerkily, grabbed her bag and ran.

* * *

Derwin’s shack wasn’t hard to find. The blue shipping crate was rusty and faded, but it was the only one of that color against the southeast wall. Beside it was the shack in question, a cobbled-together mess of lumber and sheet metal. A dish antenna extended from the roof, and a crude stickman was drawn to the right of the door in white paint.

By the time she made it, there were already sirens going off and troops marching through the streets. She ducked under the dirty awning as a gunship zipped by overhead, and rapped hard on the metal door.

A shifty-looking man answered it. He had red hair matted with filth and wore a brown jacket with one missing sleeve over a red shirt with a diagonal white arrow printed on it. His green eyes darted to and fro, then glanced down at his watch- a smartwatch with a pink strap- as if he was waiting for something.

“Are you Derwin?” Calla asked quickly, trying to keep the apprehension out of her voice.

The man looked furtively both ways, then half-pulled, half-lead her into the shack, slamming the door and latching a small collection of locks behind him.

While the shack looked large on the outside, it was cramped inside. Cardboard boxes were stacked against the far wall, with a sleeping bag rolled up in front of them. Jammed in the back corner was a small desk made of scrap wood, holding an archaic beige box of a computer and a somewhat newer looking monitor. A game- a first-person shooter set in a wasteland, by the look of it- sat paused on screen. A pot of noodles boiled away on a precariously perched butane stove, filling the shack with the aroma of fake chicken.

He glanced at his watch again, then threw his arms wide and grinned, showing a crooked smile of yellowed teeth. “Run into trouble? Want to sell your body? Just plain tired of this cesspool? Welcome to Derwin’s Smuggling Emporium. You want out, I’m your guy.”

Calla could do without the theatrics. On edge, she snapped, “How much?”

“One thousand,” Derwin answered firmly. He snuck another glance at his watch. “No vouchers, no stamps, cash only.”

Calla pulled the money out of her pocket and practically shoved it at the smuggler. She hadn’t counted it, but figured it was just a hair under $400.

He laughed, pushing her money away with one hand. “For that, I’ll throw one of your body parts over the fence. Your choice, pick your favourite one.”

She shoved it forward again. “It’s all I have. Please.”

“Too bad.” He pushed the wad of cash back once more, and then glanced at his watch _again_. “Unless you have some… other way to pay.”

Rage coursed through Calla’s already very stressed veins, and before she realized what she was doing she had Scrappy raised, blade and barrel against the smuggler’s neck. As intimidating as she could- probably not very, given how much her voice wavered- she threatened, “You- you take the money and you get me out! Or I blow your… face off and find someone else.”

The man stood fast and refused to react. For a long moment, Derwin just stared at her. Then, a thin smirk appeared on his lips. He glanced down at his watch, then quipped, “Someone’s been watching too many movies. Audacious. You’ll need that.”

“So, do we have a deal?” She again tried and failed to keep her voice steady.

“We have a deal.” Derwin took the cash, then reached down and yanked a green rug off the floor with a dramatic flourish, revealing a narrow tunnel underneath. “Crawl toward the light. Good luck out there, and remember, no refunds.”

* * *

The sun was starting to fall by the time Calla emerged from the tunnel, cleverly hidden behind a bush. It hadn’t been that long of a tunnel, but she’d gotten up late, and hadn’t been paying attention to the time when she made her way to Derwin’s shack.

She stood tall, working out the kinks from her back, and took a deep breath.

Fresh air. Free air.

It was eerie to stand outside the cement walls and chain-link fences of the Braddock Resettlement Center. The last time she’d been outside, she was a scared little girl and the Center was a tent city. In a way, it was the only world she knew. Sooner or later she’d have to get moving, before the search parties-

The blaring of a car horn interrupted her thoughts. A white car rolled up beside her, and the horn bleated again as the driver’s side window rolled down.

The driver was smoking a cigarette- a pungent Terran one-, which cast his face in a strange glow. “You’re not my usual girl. It’s all right, I’m not picky. Don’t even care about the outfit.”

“What?” she asked, confused. “Did Derwin send you? Are you here to pick me up?”

“Great, this one’s a retard,” the man muttered. “Yes, I’m here to pick you up. Get in the back.”

There was something off about the situation, but something had been off since she’d got up in the morning. With no better option, she climbed into the back of the car. The driver floored it and they sped away.

* * *

“A girl. Maybe seventeen or eighteen,” Derwin practically spat into the phone. “Taller than me- yes, tall for a girl by Terran standards. Purple hair, blue eyes.”

The woman at the other end opened with an offer which he didn’t even listen to.

“No price, not this time. This one’s on me.” Usually, they’d negotiate back and forth, him trying to get more money or more goods, the other party trying to spend less, but this time, he didn’t care.

She was surprised by that, of course. She even asked, rhetorically, whether he had found a sense of patriotism to her country.

He shook his head as if that would translate over the phone. “I still don’t give a shit about your Uncle Sam. She put a gun to my head!”


End file.
